Heineken vs Mini and the giant boxes in Amsterdam.

This Badlander is hilarious, and classic. The ideas are good, and unusual, they appeared in the same city, only ten days apart (or less even). If there was ever a time I'd bet on the idea-God messing with creatives heads, this one is it. Around the 16th/17 of December, TBWA\Neboko sent people with giant boxes out in the Christmas shopping crowd. Presumably, they had bought some lucky fellar a walk-in-fridge, just like in that ad. This made for eye-catching ambient, especially as people were trying to bring them on trams.

Post-Christmas rolls around, and now Mini are littering Amsterdam with giant boxes. Supposedly, people living nearby had gotten a big red box with a car in it for Christmas, and these unwrapped & discarded boxes were spotted in the rubbish piles around PC Hoofstraat, Spui and Waterlooplein. Hilarious!

....And since anyone who works in advertising knows, it does take time to get ideas approved by everyone and the client, and then sent into production before launch - ten days seems an awfully short time to actually copy someone else.

Looks like these teams had the same idea at the same time, and in all likelihood, they were kicking themselves when they saw the similarities. ....or, there's a Big Brown Box salesman preying on the ad agencies of Amsterdam right now filling his sales quota.

Either way, I'm very amused that the infamous trash piles around Amsterdam have become a natural part of ambient media, even Interior Matters.nl used the street trash as ad space.
Might want to clean that up, city of Amsterdam.